Why Math Matters in Product Design

By: Tom Lee

"Look at your own desktop. If you have a shelf full of used paper notebooks, piles of scrap papers with various formulas and descriptions sketched out; if you have a couple of reference books that you pull formulas from; if you see a calculator or if you have Excel on your computer, you are doing math ... real math. And more importantly, you are doing math that is not well-supported by the automated design systems."

"Systems like Maple explicitly manage math information in a way that is closer to the way people work. In addition to the raw number-crunching, they eliminate manipulation errors in formula derivations, maintain unit consistency, and let you capture the mathematics in well documented, reusable forms. This support for broad range of engineering tasks has resulted in a dramatic increase in the popularity of systems like Maple."

"There is a definite trend in industry: as modeling and math become more accepted practice as opposed to a pure research activity, engineers are now beginning to discover deficiencies in the conventional tool chain. Tools like Maple are proving to be a critical part of the new arsenal of analytical software tools for modern engineering."